Ritual’s Role in Social Innovation and Design
DO WE NEED RITUAL?
No matter what we do – from guiding our child’s evening prayer, to the way we prepare our food, to how we hire and fire people at work, to how we say hello on our iphone, to celebrating our nations leaders, to ringing the bell on wall street, to starting an act of war. It’s all loaded with ritual.
Ritual is what defines our lives. The blending of these rituals becomes the tight weave that make up a society’s mythology. Myth, a cloth made of ritual threads, drives all of our actions and decisions, done mostly without knowing it. So for me, it’s less about bringing ritual into our technical lives, as much as becoming more conscious of them.
We have forgotten rituals’ place, their vital power in manifesting our world, thus making their practices irreverent. Bringing back the Sacred into our daily walk and talk, becoming observers of how we ritualize, and transforming the ones that no longer serve us. This I believe, is the most important thing we humans can do to transform our world.
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Inquiry: Starting everyone of my questions with ‘open ended’ question words including the 6 ‘W’s: WHY is it this way, WHAT is it exactly, (w)HOW does it work, WHO is involved, WHEN is it enacted, WHERE does it reside or show up. In this way, your research will expand from isolated assumptions into broader understandings and improve data outcomes.
A more challenging but (in my view) more fun part of development, is enabling your research into a ‘social performance’ process for creating social capital and social innovation. This is done through 3 phases as follows (note ‘phases’ are different than ‘stages’):